The Only Winning Move

Crisis averted. Canadian Governor General Michaelle Jean, after meeting with Stephen Harper for two hours today, has approved Harper’s request to prorogue Parliament. This is an unusual measure that puts the government on ice temporarily. Parliament will close until January, when Harper and the Conservatives will be expected to table another budget.

For those of you not following this (by which I mean, roughly speaking, the entire world) - budget issues are always confidence motions. If a government fails to pass a budget, it stirs up all kinds of constitutional issues, sometimes triggering new elections. Since the budget announcement, the opposition parties (of which there are three in Canada) have been threatening to band together to form a coalition government to replace Harper. The math works out such that no two of them can do it, but if all three sign on, they have more total seats than the Conservatives in Commons. Upon failure of the budget, they could (and were threatening to) ask the Governor General to hand the government to them without an election. Stephane Dion - current but temporary leader of the Liberal Party - would’ve become Prime Minister in Harper’s place.

The reason they can kinda sorta get away with this without an election is because Harper and the Conservatives don’t technically have enough seats to form a government. Generally, you need an absolute majority - either from your own party or in a coalition deal with some other party. The Conservatives have what’s called a “minority government,” whereby they don’t have enough seats to pass legislation without help from the Opposition. Since Harper’s government doesn’t have a clear victory in the last election, it’s not technically ouside the law for a Liberal-NDP-Bloc coalition to ask the Governor General to nullify the last election and let them form the government instead. In fact, they had that option at the end of the last election and neglected to take it - mostly becuase by tradition the party with the most votes gets the first chance at forming a government, and Harper and the Conservatives had formed the last government with fewer seats than they have now. It’s hard, under those circumstances, to deny the Conservatives a second mandate.

It must be stressed: contra to what Harper keeps claiming, everything the Coalition is doing is perfetly legal. It’s just that it’s unorthodox and doesn’t show much inclination to let the Canadian public have a say.

I think that given the circumstances, the Governor General has made the right decision. Parliament is closed until January, meaning the confidence motion coming on Monday that would’ve toppled the government and given the Opposition the chance to form a coalition government without an election to replace Harper will not take place. Meaning that Harper is still Prime Minister until at least January 27. Meaning, more importantly, that everyone has time to cool off and sort things out rather than resorting to melodramatic, legally questionable, and in any case undemocratic power grabs. If Dion and Layton (and Duceppe, but no one cares) have concerns with the federal economic policy in general and Harper’s leadership in particular, they now have a chance to air them publicly. And the government has a chance to address those concerns. This is the right choice: take your finger off the trigger for a minute and think about what you’re doing.

This isn’t at all how I expected things to turn out. GG Jean, it seems pretty clear to me, is no Stephen Harper fan. It’s to her credit that she passed on the easy opportunity to oust him and instead opted for a cooling off period. That, in other words, she did her job.

As charges of media bias become more commonplace, you have to get sophisticated to maintain credibility if you’re making one. So a common charge one hears these days - a favorite of Glenn Greenwald’s, actually - is that the media can be biased by reporting from a neutral standpoint on an issue that doesn’t really have one. Here’s a good example of the technique:

According to an Angus Reid poll for CTV, 64 percent of Canadians do not support Stephane Dion becoming prime minister in a coalition government, but 53 percent are against the Conservatives’ current economic policy.

Earth to CP: opposition to the government’s economic policy does NOT equate to approving of coups!

Flashback to October 14. There was a legitimate election. Stephen Harper and the Conservatives won - gained seats, even. True, not enough for a majority government, but let’s have a look at the numbers:

In what way is this not a Conservative mandate? If people had wanted Stephane Dion to be Prime Minister, they wouldn’t have handed his party its worst defeat since 1984. Those 26 seats didn’t vanish for no reason.

Now - granted that Canada isn’t the western world’s model democracy. The NDP polls 8% higher than the Bloc and still ends up with fewer seats because…the game is pretty obviously stacked. So I guess some caution is in order any time you talk about a Canadian election result as though it had very much to do with public opinion. Still - whatever you think about the Tories’ standing after the last election, it’s clear the Liberals lost. No party can post a 26 seat loss in a second-place finish and plausibly claim a mandate.

Things have changed since October - that much is true. If the opposition wants to put the government to a confidence vote, that’s certainly their right, and given the economic situation far from beyond the pale ethically. But they need to then hold an election to let the people they govern in on the deal. I realize that the Governor General’s duties don’t technically include deciding when elections will be held, but I think it’s possible for her to make it a condition of dissolving Parliament. That is in fact what she should do. Yes, Canada just had an election. Yes, it was poorly attended. Yes, it was the third one in four years. Yes, people are getting tired of things not being settled. But I can’t imagine anyone prefers the naked and corrupt power grab that the Grits and the NDP are proposing as an alternative.

And so I had to chuckle when I read the CP equating “opposition to the Conservatives’ current economy policy” with “not supporting Stephane Dion becomming Prime Minister.” It would sound harmless enough to anyone who didn’t understand that Stephane Dion’s “bid” for the PM slot was a brazen and only barely constitutional power grab that completely disregards democratic tradition, if not quite the letter of the law. The two questions aren’t even in the same league.

Come on.

UPDATES (2008-12-04):

Here’s Stephen Harper’s national address last night.

And a less oily version of the same speech given as a statement to the press earlier yesterday:

And just because it’s funny - here’s Stephane Dion not 7 weeks ago during the election explicitly rejecting the coalition he now proposes to form:

I like to make fun of Evolutionary Psychology as being nothing more than a bunch of just so stories. If an experiment finds that men cheat more than women, why that’s because humans evolved that way! And if next week someone finds some evidence that women cheat more than men, no doubt there’ll be some reason to believe that it’s “only natural” that we evolved THAT way as well. Since nothing in human evolution can be tested in the laboratory, it’s an endless generator of pointless ex post “explanations” for stuff we already know with next to no useful predictive power.

However, a recent entry on Mr. Tweedy’s blog reminds me that there are some evolutionary mysteries here and there. It deals with the Monty Hall Problem - a famous cognitive illusion named after the host of gameshow Let’s Make a Deal, which used a verion of the problem as its main schtick.

The game is played like this. You are presented with three doors, all closed. Behind one of the doors is a prize of some kind (usually a car), and behind the other two are goats. You are asked to pick one at random, so you do. At this point, your chances of having picked the door with the car behind are 1/3. The host is now obligated to open one of the remaining two doors, and he always opens a door to reveal a goat. So at this point in the game, we’ve seen one of the three doors opened and have been shown a goat behind it. You are now given a choice: you may stick with your original guess, or you may switch your guess to the other unopened door. If the door you pick has a car behind it, you get to keep it. If it has a goat, you go home empty-handed. The question is, is it to your advantage to switch your choice or to stick with your original pick?

The professor who first introduced me to this problem confesses that every time he teaches it he has to first reconvince himself that the answer is right. And he’s not alone. According to the Wikipedia article on the problem (linked above), when this was featured in Parade magazine in 1990 something like 10,000 people, about 1,000 of whom had PhDs and some of whom even had Nobel prizes in related fields, wrote in to say that the magazine had got it wrong. And of course I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I’m any different: it’s really counterintuitive for me too, and when I read Mr. Tweedy’s entry I had to sit down for about 20mintues and think it through even though I already knew his explanation was right. As you’ve no doubt guessed from the preceding discussion, the right answer is indeed that you should switch your choice. As it turns out, if you switch your choice, you get it right 2 out of every 3 games you play, whereas if you stick with your original choice, you’re only right 1 out of every 3 times.

Why?(!!???!!) I mean, I and apparently everyone else in the world would like to say that you’re no better off having seen the goat behind the door the host opens - and that’s because seeing the goat hasn’t added any information about which of the remaining two doors the car is behind. In the original situation, you have a 1/3 chance out of three mysterious doors to be right. In the updated situation, you have a 1/2 chance, but the point is there is nothing to distinguish your two choices, right?

Right, actually, which is why the illusion is so powerful. But is IS an illusion, and here’s why. The trick is that it isn’t so much seeing the goat as being allowed to switch your pick that’s the source of the advantage. People are right that seeing the goat doesn’t add any knowledge about which of the two remaining doors the car is behind - not really. The advantage comes from the fact that you are given an opportunity to pick from a greater pool of choices, half of which have been helpfully eliminated for you.

To see this, think of each possibility in the game as a tuple, where the number on the left represents your choice, and the number on the right represents the door with the car behind it. There are nine possible games, in other words, and in three of the nine cases your original choice is correct:

Let’s say you chose door 1. That means that you’re playing out of the choices in the top row, and your chances of being right are indeed 1/3 - because there’s only one situation out of the three situations where you pick door number one where the car is also behind that door.

But if your chances of being right were 1/3, your chances of being wrong were 2/3. There are two possibilities for where the car could be that differ from your first choice, but only one that coincides with it.

So think of it this way. There is a 1/3 chance that the yellow tuple is right, but a 2/3 chance that one of the blue tuples is right. If you switch your choice, you get to pick from a group that has a 2/3 chance of being right, but you are assured of not making the wrong choice out of this group. The host has shown you which choices in this group are definitely wrong, so you’re given an advantage here. Since the host has kindly shown you which of the two of that 2/3 pool is wrong, you can choose from this pool with relative safety. You have a 2/3 chance of being right by switching, and only a 1/3 chance by sticking. The real game is the choice between yellow and blue, and blue always has a 2/3 chance of being right.

Mr. Tweedy wrote a PHP program to demonstrate this, which you can run here. Since PHP is messy and unreadable and Python is clean and clear, I’ve done the world the great favor of posting a Python version, which you can see or download by clicking on the link. It accepts a command line parameter for how many tests you want to run, so to run 500 trials from the command line (assuming you have Python installed on your system - which of course you should!):

$python monty-python.txt 500

It’s written in such a way that you can increase the number of doors if you like. Just change the numberDoors variable at the top of the file to something else. (Or, if you want to add a command line parameter for the number of doors, just uncomment line 48.) If you’ve been paying attention, it should be obvious that the higher you increase the number of doors, the closer your chances get to being even on switching and sticking (although, unless I’m mistaken, there’s always a slight advantage to switching no matter how great the number of doors, so long as the number is finite).

I’ve included an online version too - but only variable by number of trials, not by number of doors. Type the number of trials (less than 1000) you want to see in the space below and hit Send and it will show you results. (I haven’t done any sanity checks, so if you want to put something stupid in there like an exclamation point, go ahead and be clever like that - you’ll get a not very helpful error message.)

In any case, as you can see by running either of our programs, a large enough number of times, switching does indeed win you the game 2/3 of the time, whereas sticking only works out for you 1/3 as often. Strange but true.

Evolving this kind of systematic failure to understand how the world really works doesn’t seem like much of an evolutionary advantage. Ah - but there’s the rub about evolution in general. Evolution isn’t meant to explain every little detail about why we are like we are. It just so happens that we ended up at the top of the food chain even with this massive inbuilt perceptual disadvantage. The best we can say is that (a) we didn’t seem to have any critical competitors who didn’t have the same disadvantage at crucial stages in our evolution or (b) that if they did have the advantage that it was never decisive at the right moments. Or else (c) that our ability to reason compensates. Or (d) that any number of millions of combinations of these things is true. Or even (e) that someday we’ll meet The Buggers out in space and they won’t have evolved this disadvantage and we’ll be royally screwed. Or (f) we won’t because they’ll have some other cognitive disadvantage that’s worse. Or… Or… See - not very helpful this evolutionary psychology stuff.

Wow. Revolution in Canada. ALL the opposition parties (even the Bloc) managed to come together and agree to form a coalition headed by DION. For those 6billion of you who aren’t Canada junkies like me, this is stunning because Dion, the “head” of the Liberal Party, has actually already stepped down as party leader. He was to be replaced at the party conference in the Spring after having resigned (under pressure) for getting throttled in an election the Liberals probably should have won (given that they could’ve exploited the burgeoning financial crisis - still in its infancy at the time, to be fair, but definitely on the horizon), or at least come in at a more respectable second (they’re at their second-lowest total number of seats in modern times - the lowest being the historical, and richly deserved, drubbing of 1984). Obviously this is over concerns that sitting PM Stephen Harper hasn’t been taking the financial crisis seriously enough. The Liberals and the NDP would love to throw a bunch of money at it. Harper, however, notes that Canada’s banks are much sounder than anyone else’s and doesn’t see the need. But this is Canada, so they don’t wanna be left out of the worldwide inflation party. I mean hell, they might actually fall behind on the Government-as-percentage-of-GDP curve! And THEN what would it mean to be Canadian, eh?

Yeah, I think it’s stupid. Canada doesn’t have to fall into this hole with the rest of us because it’s been running a tighter banking system. No doubt the crisis will hit it too (something like 80% of its exports go to the US, where consumer confidence is hitting rock bottom after all), but not in any systemic way. All they have to do is ride it out - and maybe even pick up some foreign holdings bargains in the process, who knows? Their budget has been in surplus for some time, they already have the generous unemployment insurance system in place (for what will no doubt be soberingly high unemployment levels for a couple of years up there, let’s not kid ourselves where this is headed in that unions’ utopia), all they have to do is run a deficit for a couple of years - something they have a LOT of experience with. In short, Canada’s in for some rough bumps with the rest of us, but UNLIKE the rest of us they can afford to weather it on autopilot. There is absolutely no need for all this drama.

Stepehn Harper was the last credible voice for capitalism on the national leadership scene. I’m very sorry to see him go.

I’m all for this. It’s an article by Helen Rittlemeyer - she whose name seems to be so up-and-coming amongst the conservative ashes - called “Jezebels with a Cause.” And it’s about reacting to date rape, so you know it’s a can o’ worms.

The take is novel, but it shouldn’t be. To sum up quickly, Rittelmeyer notes without explicitly saying so that date rape has been going on as long as there’ve been frat boys and drunk girls, and girls have been coping that whole time. That a couple of them recently went on a(n internet) radio show and casually mentioned having been date raped - treating it as annoying, but not really a big deal - turns out to be the proverbial canary in the coalmine. This mythology about date rape as huge emotional trauma was bound to come crashing down at some point, and we’re seeing the beginnings.

“Jezebel” here is … well, one of a great many faintly obscure references, actually. I had to look it up: it turns out it’s pretty much a catchall for any kind of woman the speaker doesn’t like. Here it’s used in a way that squares pretty nicely with its biblical roots, though: as a woman who does something she hasn’t been explicitly forbidden to do, but which nevertheless has the effect of upsetting a delicate social arrangement, and in any case who gets blamed all out of proportion to the “crime.” In this case, the idea is that yeah, sure, it’s bad in some sense to let guys off the hook for date rape. But in another sense, can anyone who’s taken an honest look at Third Wave Feminism not have seen this coming?

The truth is that Third Wave Feminism is riddled with all kinds of contradictions about sex. The biggest, most glaring, hardest-to-ignore of all these contradictions is its double standard regarding sexual responsibility. On the one hand, sex is a positive thing, and we’ll know a woman is liberated when she is freed from parochial attitudes about how women should view it. In short, that she should be able to enjoy sex for sport just like a man if she so desires, that her sexuality is hers alone, not the property of society in general. So far so good: it’s impossible to deny that the old stud/slut dichotomy was unfair. On the other hand, rape remains the cardinal sin under this system because it denies a woman control over her sexuality. But herein lies the problem - because you see, the idea that a woman is vulnerable - etymologically “able to be wounded” - by sex was the mainstay of the old puritain morality. Men could pursue with abandon because sex isn’t internal to them - they aren’t “violated” by it. Women, however, are, and so must keep themselves “pure” for their husbands. Putting rape at the top of the totem makes logical sense from one point of view: because if returning control over women’s bodies to the women themselves is our central political concern, then rape is a clear violation. From another point of view, though, it’s a retrenchment, and that’s because it reaffirms the idea that sex can be a (uniquely male) weapon.

Out of this contradiction comes the completely bizarre campus sex culture - whereby men are always and in all ways responsible for any sexual encounter that takes place, but girls are free to drink themselves into a stupor without having to worry about a goddamned thing. Any attempt to explain the dangers brings charges of “blaming the victim.” Any attempt to mention the all-too-obvious potential for abuse is “failing to take the problem seriously.”

Actually, I suspect a lot of Third Wave Feminists aren’t as clueless as they seem. I’ve always imagined they privately raise gin and tonics to toast having foisted a double standard on men - as a kind of affirmative action payback for the stud/slut double standard that women dealt with for so long. A woman is free to get drunk and there’s nothing irresponsible about that - but you, sir, must behave yourself no matter how much you’ve imbibed. HA! That’ll learn ya about calling us “sluts” for doing what you (say you) want! It isn’t the most mature approach, but then, no one has ever accused Third Wave Feminists of reaching adulthood. (Or the fratboys who held to the goddess/whore double standard, for that matter.)

Rittelmeyer’s column is meant to defend the girls who went on the radio and talked about date rape as though it were not the end of their healthy emotional lives. Her reasoning is that this is not only more rational, but also much more “empowering” than the route of constantly worrying about one’s reputation that Third Wave Feminism offered.

Before the interview turned to date rape and pulling out, Winstead told a story about how her group of college friends used to find men the night before moving apartments and sleep with them in order to get help moving furniture. This doesn’t undermine her argument that sex without consent should be illegal, but it makes it difficult for her to say straight-faced that gray rape should be an emotional catastrophe.

Quite. Rape of any kind is clearly a violation of bodily integrity and therefore clearly is and should be a crime. But it’s just silly to go on and on as though girls who casually throw themselves around at parties are so uptight about sex that the man who slept with her while she was passed out has somehow stolen something precious from her. People take precautions to avoid having precious things stolen from them. Leaving my car unlocked wouldn’t make stealing it OK, but it would certainly make it more likely - and so I lock my car. It isn’t that I’m worried I would condone stealing by leaving it open - it’s more just that I can’t afford to buy a new car right now, so… We take care of things we value.

Then came a new generation, one more willing to entertain the idea that, when a man takes an already sexual encounter one specific step too far, it’s a violation of self-ownership only to the extent that stealing a woman’s copy of The Feminine Mystique is a violation of book-ownership: criminal, but nothing to get into therapy over.

Again, right. The strangest aspect of the whole “rape-as-ultimate-crime-against-humanity” culture has always been the attempt to equate a guy not pulling out on command with some kind of depraved viking pillaging. They just aren’t the same thing. No matter how many seminars you hold to say they are, they’re not. If you go into a guy’s room and get naked with him and blow him and then suddenly decide that you don’t want to have sex - well, clearly that’s your right, but you’re not gonna be able to convince any clear-thinking person that sex at that point would’ve been a life-changing trauma for you. Getting clubbed over the head and dragged off to a dungeon - fine. But this clearly isn’t that.

Either sex is mundane or it isn’t. If it is mundane, then it doesn’t make sense to get so riled about men who seize marginally more intimacy than they were offered. If it isn’t mundane, then feminism will have to undo two decades’ work and resurrect words like ’slut.’

Perfect. We should all be able to agree, I think, that it’s up to the individual woman to decide whether sex is “mundane” for her or not. It’s easy to see how that would be a matter of individual preference. Those girls who think of sex as something special and sacred will obviously be traumatized by almost any kind of rape - even the drunken frat party kind where she sent some signals she regrets and decides midway through she wants out. But to the extent that sex is sacred, of course, she’ll take steps not to be in that situation twice. For those girls for whom sex is mundane, then finding date rape annoying - infuriating even - but not traumatizing is simply a logical inevitability. If your bodily integrity can be sacrificed for mere momentary pleasure, then it’s hard to see why shrugging off a drunken roll in the hay that you didn’t necessariy ask for would be supernaturally difficult.

I suppose we could do Rittelmeyer one better and say that sex is both sacred and profane, and that which it is depends on the partner. If it’s the first time with someone you’ve been lusting after for years, then of course it’s going to have big significance for you. If you’re in a committed relationship and swear off all others, then ditto. But if you’re out on the town in search of a good time - well, there’s that kind of sex too, and the point is that people can pick and choose between them as suits their needs at a particular point in their lives. What shouldn’t be controversial is that sex is never “trauma” if it’s just one baby step further than the woman was willing to go anyway. To maintain that it is requires you to build up a whole edifice of mystique around sex and women that is no more liberating and no less ridiculous than what we inherited from the Victorians. Since it is artificial, it was inevitable that society would see through it. Rittelmeyer defends these two girls as heralding the beginning of that process, and I see no reason to disagree with her.

Go read the whole article. It isn’t the best-written bit of internet polemic you’ve ever seen. Indeed, it comes across as sort of jumbled - a signature product of rushing something out but simultaneously wanting to be thoughtful. I’m betting the author clacked it out at lightning speed and then revised it about a thousand times, never able to decide exactly how far she wanted to take it. She’s no Camille Paglia. But it’s a brave thing to put out there all the same, given today’s political climate, and it’s in any case impossible to disagree with the conclusion. I suspect she’s right: we’re seeing the crest of the Fourth Wave Feminism just starting to form.

The interesting question is whether there will be a Fifth Wave at all?

When is politics not allowed in literary criticism? When it acts like a filter, that’s when. If, upon encountering so much as a hint of a political theme you dislike, you instantly shut down and refuse to look further, then you have a little homunculus censor living in your brain who is interfering with your ability to fully appreciate life.

Roger Ebert has this problem. I think he’s a good movie critic for the most part. As a general rule, I can read his reviews and know whether I will enjoy a movie. Sometimes, I even come to reconsider how I feel about movies I’ve already seen by reading what he thinks about them. And then there are those other times when I can read a four-star review of his and know for certain I’ll hate the film. Or, as was the case this weekend, a one-star review that tells me without a doubt I’ll love it.

The movie is 3 O’Clock High, a cult 80s high school film (no, not one of those 80s high school films) that I’d caught scenes from over the years but never sat down and watched all the way through. It’s not a great film. But it is entertaining, a brilliant nostalgia vehicle (for those of us who were born in the 70s and grew up in the 80s), and even if it’s not a stand-out classic, it’s at least one of the better examples of its genre.

Ebert gave it one star. Why? Because it’s “fascist.” Because the story involves a kid shitting his shorts all day scrambling around trying everything he can think of to get out of a confrontation with the school bully that goes down at 3 o’clock and - horror of horrors - the bully doesn’t have a “human side.”

If there is a pathological bully in the student body, no attempt is made to understand him, sympathize with him or encourage the audience in the difficult process of empathy.

It’s too tough on today’s teenage moviegoers, I guess, to ask them to hold two ideas in their mind at once: that a kid could be a bully and that he could also have some big problems and be in need of understanding.

Yeah, nice try, but I call bullshit, and here’s why:

The Thompson character, for example, is not just a distant, unattainable symbol, but a young woman with feelings. The tomboy doesn’t just pine from afar, but helps Keith in his campaign to win a date with this girl of his dreams. And in the final sequence, in which the tomboy acts as chauffeur on the dream date, the dialogue isn’t about sex; it’s about learning to be true to yourself and not fall for the way people are packaged. By the movie’s end, everybody has learned something about themselves.

That’s from his review of Some Kind of Wonderful, the actual John Hughes installment from the same year. Anyone who’s seen it will have noticed a glaring omission. Yes, that’s right, Some Kind of Wonderful has a class bully too - or at least an unreasonable bad guy. And no, this bad guy in Some Kind of Wonderful hasn’t “learned anything about himself” by the end of the film either. Mostly he just gets egg on his face - which is what stock bully characters show up in movies to do.

So what’s the difference? Why is it OK for the bad guy in Some Kind of Wonderful to be a stock plot device, but not in 3 O’Clock High? I think it’s the leather jacket. You see, in Some Kind of Wonderful, the bad guy is a Rich Snob, but in 3 O’Clock High he’s working class. And one-dimensional bad guys are only ever allowed in Roger Ebert’s world if they’re making an Acceptable Political Point^tm.

I know what you’re thinking, and no, it isn’t that Some Kind of Wonderful is the more thoughtful film. It certainly takes itself more seriously, but the plot contrivances in it are every bit as transparent as those of every other movie of the genre. There’s the working class kid who wants to be an artist, he’s in love with the popular girl who won’t give him the time of day and is in turn loved by his tomboy working class friend. He has a shot with the popular girl, but only because her jerk of a boyfriend is every fratboy child-of-privilege stereotype in the book turned up to 11. If Ebert rates this one higher than other study hall ’sploitation movies, it’s only because he never took the time to ask himself why this or any girl considers this guy serious relationship material in the first place. Trophy date, sure, but no girls I know would be in love with him for “who he is.” No, Some Kind of Wonderful is entertaining, but it’s a comic book, right up to the last scene where our hero makes The Right Choice in what has got to be one of the more implausible Moments of Realization in 80s cinema. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

My axe to grind here is that people who think Some Kind of Wonderful is deep don’t get to diss 3 O’Clock High - not if they really paid attention. Yeah, sure, our resident bully is a stock plot device, but then, that’s rather the point. The movie isn’t about the fight, and it isn’t about giving the bully his comeuppance. It’s just a nice, light-hearted exaggeration of having “one of those days.” You know - “those days” … of the kind we all have in high school. In college, for that matter. At work. In the nursing home. With the difference being that when you’re in high school everything always seems so much more important than it really is. 3 O’Clock High has the same basic message that every high school movie has: that you’ve got more in you than you think, but sometimes it takes a little pressure to bring it out. I liked this one better than most because the comical exaggeration is better than most. The bully isn’t really even a character. He’s an implausible force of nature - ridiculous by design, because the whole point is that it be ridiculous. What the movie is trying to capture is that feeling we all had in high school of being under huge amounts of pressure but unable to complain about it because we know that “it’s just high school” and the Real World is gonna be so much worse, all the while unable to ignore the reality that it actually is hard - sensing a disconnect in there somewhere. 3 O’Clock High nails that feeling and manages to be really entertaining in the process. I give it 3 stars at least.

The take-home message is that “stodgy” is a common word because it’s a common concept. I get that it’s impossible to turn off your moral radar when watching movies. Movies are about people and values and all that good stuff, and I can see how it would be impossible to like a movie that’s cheering for something you think is evil. But I think you don’t get to trash a movie based on the costumes alone. If you’re going to write about a movie’s values, you need to at least make an effort to understand what they are. Not all bit characters need to be real people - but if you’re going to be so silly as to insist that they always do, you don’t get to make special exceptions for those vaunted caricatures you happen to approve of.

Politics are bad in criticism when they get in the way of seeing what’s on the screen in front of you.

There are a million ways to get out of a fight, but not in the Hollywood of Rambo. Even a dumb teen movie such as this has to end with one of those fist fights where every blow sounds like the special effects guys are whacking bicycle seats with Ping-Pong paddles. Is that all life is? The vicious define the terms? They say we will fight them, and so we have to? And we win because someone slips us some brass knuckles so we can coldcock the guy? Come on.

Well, yes, actually. What would Ebert suggest instead? Isn’t it sometimes the case that the vicious say we have to fight them, and so we do? Did he sleep through history class or something? There are those fights you can avoid, and there are those you can’t. There are those that only make things worse if you avoid them. And if your enemy brings brass knuckles to the fight intending to coldcock you, even though he’s naturally stronger and taller than you, then yes, I think it’s OK to pick them up off the ground and use them to fight back. So, for that matter, does everyone else. And so, for that matter, does Roger Ebert - when the movie is called Some Kind of Wonderful and the protagonist shows up to an easily avoidable fight with a gang of ruffians for backup. Feh.

Probably THE thing I’m most interested in in my hobby field of Economics at the moment is Deflation - which most economists think of as a general fall in prices (probably owing to waning demand), and which Austrian and Monetarist Economists think of as a drop in the money supply (the amount of money and available credit floating about). Obviously these two things are related, and in light of the current situation it’s interesting to compare the two definitions. By the standard definition, we’re definitely in a deflation. Prices are falling (the CPI is down 0.1%, and it almost never drops), and it seems to have to do with a drop in demand (people just aren’t spending as much). By the Austrian definition the situation is interesting because the Federal Reserve is trying desperately to cause inflation. Interest rates are as low as they’ve pretty much ever been, and of course the government is handing out money left and right.

There are two reasons I’m so interested in Deflation. The first is the sort of natural curiosity that everyone has for forbidden fruit. Deflation is the big bugbear of almost every school of Economics - to be avoided at nearly any cost. (Even for some Austrian economists it’s an evil - though no Austrian economist would advocate avoiding it “at any cost.”) The second is that it seems to me an inevitable consequence of a certain kind of gold standard. Imagine that there is a fixed amount of gold (or whatever commodity it is) in Fort Knox, and that’s just it - a frozen money supply. Dollars are defined at some fixed weight, and so there are only ever so many dollars floating about. It seems that in this kind of situation (which no one is advocating or will likely ever advocate) deflation would actually be an inevitable consequence of prosperity as competition and ever-increasing supply means there is always the same amount of money chasing ever greater quantities of goods and services. Prices in general would have to drop. Since I can imagine a situation in a totally alien economy where deflation would thus be a good thing, I’m curious whether anyone more knowledgable about these things than me has worked out all the implications.

So I was pleased to discover that the Mises Institute had made a copy of a book on the subject available as a free podcast download (also available in pdf form). The book is Jörg Guido Hülsmann’s Deflation and Liberty, and it tries to make the case that deflation is not only necessary but socially desireable. Since it’s so far from the standard script on the subject, I downloaded and listened to it this week.

The argument in a nutshell is that deflation and inflation are best understood in terms of the price of money, or else the size of the money supply. Inflation is when the amount of money “out there” grows relative to the amount of goods and services available. Deflation is when it shrinks. Hülsmann argues plausibly that for this reason inflation and deflation are best understood as redistributive mechanisms. Since that’s always the way I’ve thought about them too, it was nice to get some confirmation! To show how it works, let’s take an inflation example. This means that the money supply (the amount of paper dollars and available credit) grows relative to the number of goods and services. So you have the same total amount of “value out there” in the form of goods and services, what’s changed is that there’s more money available to exchange for these goods and services. OK - so clearly since the amount of value has not changed, what will have changed is who commands how much of that value. The people who get more of the new money obviously benefit from the redistribution, the people who didn’t get as much (or any) of the new money are harmed. What cannot be doubted, really, is that a redistribution of some kind has taken place. The interesting question is then who benefits and who is harmed, generally speaking? The answer seems to be that in general people who go into debt benefit from inflation and those who save are made worse off.

There are two ways to convince yourself of this. First, consider that inflation means that each dollar bill is worth a little bit less. Remember, there is exactly the same amount of value, what’s changed is that there are more dollars “out there” to spend on that value. So each dollar is a little bit weaker than it used to be. It’s sort of like if you’re measuring something in inches and are suddenly told to change to centimeters. The length of the thing that you’re measuring hasn’t changed, but it now takes more individual units of length to account for it. Second, consider that the consequence of more money being “out there” is that prices will have to rise. Since there’s more money to be had, people who make things will need more of it to maintain their position. Either way you think of it, it’s easy to see that inflation steals from people who save. Your money in the bank is now worth less than it was, whether you think of this in terms of it being a smaller portion of the overall money supply, or whether you think of it as buying less at the newly higher prices than it did before inflation. People who borrow do comparatively better, however. They buy things without having first saved for them, and if the inflation continues, they can work off their debts at inflated wages relative to the amount they borrowed, making it easier to pay off the accumulated debt.

It stands to reason, then, that deflation redistributes in favor of the savers. Money in the bank buys more than it did the day you put it in - whether you think of this in terms of it being a bigger part of a shrinking money pie, or in terms of the general price level decreasing. By contrast, people who are in debt are worse off, because they borrowed money when prices and wages were higher, and now they have to pay it off at lower wages, or by selling off things they own at lower prices.

I hadn’t ever thought of deflation in terms of helping savers, so this book really helped me see how that works. By the same token, I’d never really thought of deflation as a good thing for liberty. That’s a more complicated argument that I’ll leave it to the book to make - but the nutshell version is that since the people who print the inflated new money get to decide where it goes but don’t find it as easy to control things when they shrink the money supply, that inflation more than deflation is a tool for economic manipulation by the central bank/government.

The book was really useful to me for clearing up these issues, and so I recommend it. However, I had a few lingering questions.

1. I’m frankly a little uncomfortable with the ATB praise for deflation in the current situation. I agree that a general deflation is necessary and therefore probably welcome. However, a freefall deflation seems a bit unfair given the extent to which people have been encouraged to go into debt. Taking myself as an example, I’ve accumulated some student loan debts here in graduate school, which seemed more rational than going to work for a year and postponing graduation. I’m fully willing to take responsibility for my choice, and I’m not therefore seeking to avoid my debts. Quite the contrary - I’ve been very careful to take out these loans only from private sources, at higher interest rates, so that I am not asking anyone I don’t know (i.e. the general taxpayers) to finance my education. I consider myself a responsible borrow responding to the incentives that were placed before me, and it seems a bit unfair for the amount of my debt to suddenly inflate should prices be allowed to go into freefall. Since most people are in much worse situations than I am (from housing loans, larger quantities of student loans, etc.), the problem only compounds. A lot of innocent people will be hurt by a general deflation.
2. Related to the first reason, most people currently in debt simply won’t be able to pay under a general deflation. This will lead to lots of defaults and bankrupcies, which will dry up a lot of the capital stock for recovery. I suppose the answer to this question is that that’s to a large degree money that was never there to begin with (i.e. money the Fed pulled out of thin air), so no harm no foul. I buy that to a large extent - but surely there is some residual damage?
3. I wonder if there is a sense in which inflation is a nature’s response to central bankers trying to game the system. I’m thinking in particular here of the labor unions. They negotiate their wages higher with government backing, which has the effect of causing more inflation. Which means that some of their gains then vanish as general price levels go higher. Push the economy, and it pushes back! Of course, I suppose the answer to this one is to point to all those other workers who aren’t union members and have to deal with higher prices even though their wages haven’t necessarily gone up - in which case the unions really do gain, even if not by as much as they planned.

At any rate, an interesting book. It won’t answer all your questions by a long shot, but as food for thought on deflation (which, at a manageable hour and fifteen minutes you can easily digest during commutes), it’s a good place to start.

A friend sends the following:

(Found on Fussy)

Dnesh D’Souza is back up to his old tricks: misrepresenting Atheism rather than doing a Christian Apologist’s duty, which is recommending faith. This time, the springboard is an article in Discover (which, for reasons mysterious, D’Souza doesn’t link in his column). The gist of the article is that there are just “too many coincidences” in how the laws of the universe are set up. Basically, even slight changes in the laws of physics would make it impossible for the universe as we know it to exist, meaning that life would not exist (for example, if electrons weighed twice as much as they actually weigh, stars would burn out in a million years rather than billions, and life wouldn’t have time to evolve). D’Souza, predictably, takes this as evidence that there is a Creator - because how else can we explain all these “coincidences?”

Click on the link and take a look at the article and you’ll see that D’Souza is engaging in what we might call the Argumentum ab Advertismum - “Argument from Advertising.” The article isn’t really about the search for God, but is rather about the Multiverse Theory - you know, that theory that gave Spock a beard on Star Trek. The only reason there are references to God in the article at all is because the reporter inserts them there - presumably to sensationalize a dry subject to sell magazines (and no doubt it made a subscriber out of D’Souza, so hey!). The original reason for the Multiverse Theory - as the article itself makes clear if you bother to read it, actually - was to explain why the universe has a uniform temperature throughout. This is a problem for the Big Bang Theory, though not for other theories of cosmology. So the real motivation was to plug up some holes in the Big Bang Theory - not, as D’Souza wants his audience to think, to explain these “embarassing coincidences.”

The “embarassing coincidences” are generally “explained” by an appeal to the Anthropic Principle - which really just says that the question itself is misleading: if these “embarassing coincidences” hadn’t happened, then we wouldn’t be here to ask these questions. Some supporters of the Anthropic explanation have jokingly styled it cogito, ergo mundus talis est (”I think, therefore the world is as it is”). The point being that this is a truism; it is invoked to answer a pointless question.

The logical error being made here is obvious. For one to be troubled by why the laws of the universe are the way they are, then one first has to assume that they could have been otherwise. The problem is that it’s not clear what this means. At what point was the universe in a position to operate according to different laws than the ones according to which it does in fact operate? And according to what principle did the principles of the universe decide to be what they are? Of course, these questions are not nonsensical to religious people who have long postulated a framework for the formation of laws of reality. For them, the laws of the universe could’ve been otherwise if God had decided otherwise. Fair enough. But I don’t think you can reason that the other way. That is, it’s fair enough to say “because I believe in God, these questions are not nonsense.” But I’m not sure it’s fair to say “because I take these questions seriously, I must believe in God.” Starting without any prior prejudice on the question of whether or not there is a creator, it’s just as valid to say that the questions are nonsense. I don’t need to speculate on why the laws of the universe are what they are because my job is simply to document the laws of the universe and make predictions about its future on that basis. Once you start asking about why a framework of physical laws is one way and not another, you’re already outside the realm of science and in the realm of pulling things out of your ass (the politically correct term for this is “metaphysics”). So sure, one answer we might pull out of our ass is that God decided that the laws would be this way - but there’s no reason I can see why this explanation has any claim to prominence over any other product of one’s ass - say, the idea that there are infinite numbers of universes representing all possible arrangements of laws and we just happen to be in this one, one of the few we can plausibly inhabit. Or maybe that everything in the world is the product of minor perturbations on cosmic strings, whose composition we’re not allowed to ask about. In any case, the point is that once you start asking metaphysical questions like “great, we have these laws, but why not other laws?” you’re overreaching as far as “science” is concerned. It isn’t that they’re illegitimate questions, it’s just that they’re not scientific questions.

Now, if D’Souza wants to leap from here to “God created the world and made us all sinful until Jesus died on the Cross,” that’s his business, of course. He might even be right, for all I know. My point is just that he didn’t get there by reading a bunch of science books and then in a flash of insight saying “Of COURSE! It couldn’t have been otherwise! Every poorly-translated word of the Bible is true, by God!” Hardly. If you’re going to believe in Christianity, it’s going to be for reasons that are completely oblivious to what you did or didn’t learn in Physics class.

Well, my point is that I think people like Dawkins and Hitchens know that. The brand of religion that they’re arguing against in their books isn’t the idea that there might maybe be a Creator. They doubt it, of course, but they don’t rule it out. Nor do they have any problem with people saying “there might be a Creator, for all I know.” What they insist on is that bit I put in itallics - the “for all I know.” It isn’t idle religious speculation they mind, it’s religious certainty. It’s the kind of organized religion that claims to have answers about the nature of the universe so specific as to require that people go to Mass and eat bread together at least once a year on a highly specific day. The kind of arrogance that, for example, leads people to vote on political marriage questions based on what they think God wants - as if they even know there is a God, let alone His opinion on marriage.

The thing that’s offensive about every single column that Dnesh D’Souza has ever written is this presumption that a tie goes to the believers. Wrong. It’s just the opposite, in fact. Ties on religious questions - at least religious questions as a domain of communal knowledge - go to the non-believers. Tricking someone into thinking it’s strange that the universe is the way it is isn’t an acceptable basis for a worldview. Really, this technique is no different than convincing yourself that a perfectly familiar word like ivy sounds strange by repeating it 20 times slowly. I don’t know why we use that particular combination of syllables to refer to that particular species of plant, but I do know that it doesn’t matter. All that is required is that members of the same linguistic community agree on an appropriate combination and use it consistently. It doesn’t matter that it “could have been otherwise,” that indeed it is otherwise (in, say, Japanese). And so sure, if we sit around and repeat all the known laws of the universe to ourselves slowly over periods of years (say, as a Physics instructor), I guess they’re bound to seem strange at some point too. But just feeling it doesn’t make it so. The laws of the universe, like the combinations of syllables that make up words, are arbitrary. It doesn’t matter why they are one way and not another, the point is that they function consistently. If they were different, then the universe would be a different place, just like if English operated according to a different Phonology and different Syntax it would be not English but Some Other Language. Indeed, trying to trick someone into believing in God by saying that the universe, if even slightly different by nature, couldn’t have supported life at all, is putting the cart in front of the horse in exactly the same way that it would be to argue that Evoltuion has as its purpose the creation of Language by noting that even slight changes in human physiology would’ve made spoken communication impossible. It’s absurd. It’s true enough that the evolution of Language depends on a staggering number of what D’Souza would no doubt like to call physiological “coincidences,” but nothing about this leads anyone to the goofy supposition that Evolution has a “purpose.” Evolution is just a dumb global process. That it produced language-capable creatures is interesting, to be sure, but it’s hardly cause for wonder or amazement. That’s just how things turned out is all.

D’Souza is, of course, free to use whatever facts about the universe he likes to prop up his favorite superstitions on his own time. What I object to is this insistence on mischaracterizing the beliefs of others for the purpose of manipulating people to see things his way.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence. One sign of this is the public advertisements that are appearing in billboards from London to Washington DC. Dawkins helped pay for a London campaign to put signs on city buses saying, “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” What is striking about these slogans is the philosophy behind them. There is no claim here that God fails to satisfy some criterion of scientific validation.

Gee, might that be because they are bus slogans? Because now that you mention it, I’ve never seen a religious billboard that makes the claim that God satisfies some criterion of scientific validation either. Or a religious billboard that makes the claim that God satisfies any criterion of philosophical validation, for that matter. But I’ve certainly seen a lot of religious billboards. Does this mean that religion has given up apologetics? That the Discovery Institute packed up and went home and stopped advancing the argument that God needs a place in the science books? Hardly. No one would be so absurd as to claim that all religious arguments needed to fit on the space of a billboard. And yet D’Souza wants to people to believe that Dawkins gave up the goat on all the arguments in his book - which isn’t even out of its first print edition yet, unlike, say, the Summa Theologica - on the basis of a billboard. Obviously not.

The surest sign I have, in fact, that Christians don’t really, in their heart of hearts, believe all the crap they say is that so many of them spend this much time gaming the referee rather than playing the game. If you ask a Christian questions about the presence of evil in the world, he will be happy to tell you that he doesn’t fully understand God’s Plan, but that this isn’t a threat to his worldview. Why, then, should the fact that scientists are unable to fully explain the universe be a threat to the scientific worldview? Christians never say. No Christian takes a billboard slogan put up by some other Christian as his entire profession of faith, and indeed most would be offended if I suggested that they did. Why, then, should we Atheists be presumed to stand and fall on the basis of what Dawkins puts on buses in London? To call it a “mischaracterization” of the debate would itself be a mischaracterization on the basis of understatment.

There used to be a time as recently as 50 years ago when Christian apologists were not this silly. There used to be a time when they read philosophy and science and put a lot of time and thought into coming up with intelligent, if flawed, arguments in favor of their worldview. What happened? Now what we get are these cheap jabs. God must exist because Physics can’t tell me why the universe is this way and not another. Really? Atheism is giving up its pretentions of rationality because I saw a pro-atheist billboard the last time I was in London that didn’t mention science. Honestly?

Come on.

We’re getting on December, which means Rock and Roll Hall of Fame voting time. Not that I should care - but this year I kinda do, and that’s because I notice that Chic has been nominated again. Actually, this makes the 5th time. They were also up in 2003, 2006, 2007 and 2008 - which is, to put it in perspective, well over half of the years they’ve been elligible (to the extent that I understand these things, they’ve been elligible since 2002 - their first single having been released in 1977), and the third year in a row.

The case for Chic makes itself. Influence? Hell yes. At least three acts that are already inducted - Blondie, Queen, and Grandmaster Flash - owe them a lot. Alright, Queen maybe not so much, but I had to throw that in there just because in all the fuss about Vanilla Ice having ripped off the bass lines from “Ice, Ice Baby” from Queen’s “Under Pressure” (anyone alive in the early 90s will remember this), no one ever mentions that Queen ripped off the bass line of its biggest selling single EVAR - “Another One Bites the Dust” - from Chic’s “Good Times.” That and because I really hate Queen.

It isn’t just these three, though. Chic went on to produce just about everyone in the 80s - and if we’re sticking to Hall of Fame inductees this includes David Bowie (they practically wrote Let’s Dance for him), and most especially Madonna, who partly owes them her breakout (they inspired and then produced, at her request, her Like a Virgin album).

But the real reason, influence-wise, is that hip-hop is based on this. Quit denyin’ it. Yeah, I know, P-Funk and all that. And that’s true - P-Funk has more to do with how hip hop turned out than anyone. But Chic was important too, if not as often acknowledged.

So why all the nominations but still no cigar? Simply put, it’s because they’re a disco band.

I will never understand what it was about Disco that so offended the Rolling Stone snobs - but history speaks for itself. There was The Disco Demolition, Frank Zappa’s Sheik Yerbouti, all those “Disco Sucks” T-Shirts and buttons… Maybe this was just 60s rock realizing 10 years too late that it was dead and gone - that the hippies hadn’t managed to change humanity and bring about their twisted idea of utopia - and thank fucking God for that! There was punk, but Rolling Stone was a late adopter there too. Still, the Clash and the Ramones were eventually revered. Disco has never been forgiven … for whatever it was that it was supposed to have done.

Alright, I get it. Polyester leisure suits are silly. Yeah, but so is the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi, not to mention everything Paul McCartney ever wrote with Wings, and people still see the good in the Beatles. Every genre has its great artists and its plastic commercial album fillers, and Disco was no different. There was a lot of shit, but there was a lot of really good stuff too. Really, really good, actually. And Chic is one of those.

Give them the award already. They deserve it, you at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame know it, and the only reason you won’t is because you’re still too childish to admit you all overreacted to Disco.

(alternate link)